Affirmative Action or Negative Action

Is There a Different Way to Frame the Debate Over Race-Based
Preference?

It was 1986, and I was having a discussion with my freshman
composition class at Santa Clara University about racial preference.
Several white students were telling me about friends who should
have gotten into SCU but didn't because the University was accepting
so many "affirmative action students." Others were assuring
me that they would have been accepted at Stanford if some minority
student had not gotten their slot.

There were no African American students in the class; at that
time, the freshman African American population at Santa Clara
stood at 24 out of the total 886 freshmen. When I tried to get
my students to look at the numbers and explain why they felt
so threatened, they regarded me with the half-indulgent look
college students used to reserve for 60s children such as myself
and shrugged. They knew what they knew.

And me? As much as I liked my students, I found it easy to
write off their opinions as racist, or at the least, paranoid.

Ten years later, as the issue of affirmative action threatens
to fracture the state of California in the next election, I
think back on that conversation. It has come to represent for
me what is wrong with the public dialogue on this subject: We
throw out anecdotal evidence, mixed with a few facts and figures,
and then we all retreat into our preconceived ideas without
any empathetic consideration of the other side. At least I know
I was not really listening to what my students had to say.

I do not mean to suggest that I have changed my mind about
affirmative action. I still support it, which may seem a strange
admission in the introduction to an article that I hope will
be seen as an evenhanded exploration of the ethical issues involved.
But I have come to believe that  in the affirmative action
debate, at least  we cannot move forward unless we understand
the justice of the other side's position.

A Controversy Over Justice
At its heart, the controversy over affirmative action is a controversy
about justice. When we try to judge the justice of a social
policy, we start with the basic premise that everyone should
be treated similarly unless there is a morally relevant reason
why they should be treated differently. Whatever benefits and
burdens the society has to distribute, justice requires them
to be allocated on this basis.

For simplicity, I'll confine myself to exploring how this
premise applies to race (which, by the way, is how the debate
over affirmative action is usually couched, despite the fact
that such programs include women and other minorities). Most
people agree that the history of slavery and Jim Crow in this
country violated the first premise of justice. The color of
someone's skin is not a morally justifiable reason for treating
people differently.

Ah, but if that's so, say opponents of affirmative action,
why is it acceptable to favor people because of their skin color?
If everyone were treated similarly, wouldn't we have a colorblind
society? Indeed, the California Civil Rights Initiative, the
November ballot proposition that seeks to overturn affirmative
action, reads like this:

"The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential
treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race,
sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of
public employment, public education, or public contracting."

To clarify the values that make us come down on one or the
other side in this debate, we must address the justice of preference.
In the case of affirmative action, we must decide if there are
ever circumstances that make it fair to favor one race over
another when it comes to jobs or university admissions.

Compensatory Justice
One answer to that question might be found in the principle
of compensatory justice, which states that people who have been
treated unjustly ought to be compensated. No reasonable person
would argue with the fact that African Americans have suffered
more than their share of injustice over the course of U.S. history.
Many proponents of affirmative action defend the programs as
a kind of reparation for the terrible wrongs of slavery and
segregation. The white majority, in this view, must compensate
African Americans for unjustly injuring them in the past.

A related concept brings this argument into the present: Affirmative
action, proponents hold, neutralizes the competitive disadvantages
that African Americans continue to experience because of past
discrimination; segregated neighborhoods served by poor schools
would be an example.

23% think blacks
losing out because
of racial discrimination
is a bigger problem in
the workplace

46% think whites
losing out because
of affirmative action
is a bigger problem

The Newsweek Poll

March 23-24, 1995

President Johnson had this justification for preferential
treatment in mind when he signed the 1964 Voting Rights Act
and said: "You do not take a person who, for years, has been
hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting
line of a race, and then say, 'You are free to compete...' and
still justly believe that you have been completely fair."

While the argument for compensatory justice seems persuasive
to me, I find that it often plays differently with the folks
who are called upon to do the compensating. First of all, many
people are not ready to concede their complicity in the wrongs
of the past. It's very hard to persuade a young Asian college
applicant, whose parents did not arrive in this country for
a century after abolition, that she must take responsibility
for slavery. Others cannot see how their race puts them at a
competitive advantage. Most Appalachian out-of-work coal miners
donÕt see themselves as the benefici-aries of past favoritism.

Even the average white male  who has weaker grounds
for rejecting the compensatory argument  is beginning
to rebel against racial preference. While it may fall outside
the realm of morality to consider whether an argument is popular
or not, those of us who want affirmative action to continue
must confront the fact that many Americans believe these programs
are asking them to take their punishment like...well, like a
man. A lot of them are refusing to bend over.

A Common Good Approach
I believe there's an equally valid moral argument for affirmative
action that avoids the punitive overtones of the justice approach,
focusing instead on why these programs are in everyone's best
interest. In resolving the affirmative action question for myself,
I find the best guidance in a common good approach to ethics.
As explained in a previous issue of this publication ["Thinking
Ethically," Winter 1996], the common good consists primarily
in "ensuring that the social policies, social systems, institutions,
and environments on which we depend are beneficial to all....
Appeals to the common good urge us to view ourselves as members
of the same community, reflecting on broad questions concerning
the kind of society we want to become and how we are to achieve
that society."

Occupations and Employment: 1960-1990

White Men
White Collar
Service
Blue Collar

1960
36.0%
9.8%
54.2%

1990
47.2%
13.4%
39.4%

Black Men
White Collar
Service
Blue Collar

1960
12.1%
25.1%
62.8%

1990
30.4%
21.3%
48.3%

Source: Two Nations, Andrew Hacker.

I look around me  at the poverty, crime, and alienation
that so disproportionately afflict our minority communities
 and I ask myself, Is this the kind of society I want
to live in or the world I want my children to grow up in? The
answer to that question is much clearer to me than deciding
where justice resides in the affirmative action debate.

This is not simply a matter of feeling compassion or guilt,
though neither of those responses strikes me as inappropriate.
But beyond how I feel, I have a stake in addressing these problems.
I know that social blights cannot be confined to a particular
neighborhood or community; eventually, I will pay for every
angry, jobless, poorly educated person  through the welfare
system and through the prison system (the cost of which is fast
surpassing schools in California).

However imperfect, affirmative action has made a small dent
in the inequities that have characterized the distribution of
jobs and educational opportunities in the United States. According
to The New York Times, "The percentage of blacks in managerial
and technical jobs doubled during the affirmative action years.
During the same period, as Andrew Hacker pointed out in his
book Two Nations [Ballantine Books, 1992], the number of black
police officers rose from 24,000 to 64,000 and the number of
black electricians, from 14,000 to 43,000."

Abolition of affirmative action would clearly reverse these
gains. Cities that have dropped minority set aside programs,
for example, have experienced a sharp drop in the percentage
of government contracts going to minorities.

To say that these programs should be retained is not, however,
to ignore the claims of fairness and justice raised by opponents
of affirmative action. But I wonder if we need to define these
in the competitive manner that has characterized so much of
the debate --"You got my spot," as my students might have put
it. Wouldn't it be better to create a vision of a society in
which my good fortune did not mean your suffering?

Addressing the Underlying Scarcity
Much of the threat my students felt, I now believe, came from
the realistic assessment that they faced a dearth of employment
and educational pros-pects. The best way to foster their support
for affirmative action would be to address the underlying scarcity.

That was the experience in Atlanta, which, in preparation
for this summer's Olympic Games, awarded almost a third of $387
million in construction and vending contracts to women- and
minority-owned businesses. "Grumbling has been minimal during
Olympic preparations, largely because Atlanta's economy is so
strong that work has been plentiful," writes Kevin Sack in The
New York Times.

Freshmen Entering UCLA in 1994

Groups

Asians
Whites
Hispanics
Blacks

% of All Students
in the Class
42.2
30.7
20.0
7.1

% of Students Admitted on
Academic Criteria Alone
51.1
42.7
5.0
1.2

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education, "Other" groups
have been omitted.

A common-good argument for affirmative action is part of a
broader approach that envisions a society with plentiful work
and good education for everyone. I can imagine the eyeballs
rolling as I write these lines. Naive. Utopian. But, really,
every ethical system is utopian in that it suggests an ideal.
Why is my concept any more idealistic than the California Civil
Rights Initiative, which is premised on a colorblind society
where no one is ever discriminated against on the basis of race?

The views expressed on this site are the author's. The
Markkula Center for Applied Ethics does not advocate particular positions
but seeks to encourage dialogue on the ethical dimensions of current
issues. The Center welcomes comments
and alternative points of view.